John and Julie meet in the kitchen of what we eventually learn is a private sm sex party in Manhattan; he turns out to be an intern for her Dad, who’s a famous artist.
He’s 31, she’s 20. She discovers he has a case of knives in his backpack — and that he uses them in sex play.
But what we eventually discover about “Smoke,” a play at the Flea Theater by Kim Davies directed by Tom Costello, starring Madeline Bundy and Stephen Stout, is that the sm must stand for “slow-moving.” The 90-minute play is a sort of poor man’s “Venus in Fur” – sadomasochism between a man and a woman as a stand-in for the interplay of power and desire in relationships – without the literary allusions or intriguing twists.